October 14, 2005

After grabbing a late night iced blended mocha with my college-age roommate Hillary, she asked me if I wanted to go to a party with her.

"Sure", I said. "When?"

"Tonight"

"Tonight! What are you kidding me? It's 11PM!"

Further proof that I am getting old.

"Puhleez? It'll be fun, we'll just walk in, make an appearance, walk out. You'll be home by midnight. It's just an intimate gathering. Besides, there will be young cute college girls there. Drunk"

Five minutes, one point five miles and two hundred dollars in gasoline later, we were getting out of her car on Frat row, UCLA.

In all my days of collecting degrees and attending mind-numbing classes in organic chemistry, I'd somehow managed to avoid "College" life as it is known throughout our beer guzzling country. The closest I'd gotten was multiple viewings of John Landis's Magnum Opus.

As soon as I'd gotten out of the car, the smell of beer and weed assaulted my senses like a ton of hashish bricks.

Yelling.Squeeling.Cavorting.

Academic Probationing.

A loud crash.

A young hirscute shirtless boy throwing a bicycle off a balcony.

"Dude, It's MAD wrecked!"

We keep walking, me beginning to wish I'd worn a helmet.

A girl leans out of the passenger side of her best friends ride (a Range Rover) and yells, "Suck Me, Jake!"

A guy comes out on his balcony and gives her the finger.

In his underwear.

On a cell phone.

God bless MTV.

I see a couple on a stoop, liplocked.

His hand is ALL the way up her shirt.

I'm not sure if she's fully conscious.

Oh, she is.

See how her hand is pumping up and down underneath his cargos?

Yep, she's fine.

Hillary snaps me to attention.

"Help me find it, D. We're in search of a building called the 'Westwood Chateau'"

We ask many people.

No one knows.

Ten mutual masturbators and two hundred drunken slobs later, with the help of some high GPA Asian hipsters, we find it.

The "Chataeau" looks more like a sickly medical building from the 1950's.

Streams of drunken teens pour out of the double glass front doors like a scene out of "Sims House Party"

Fighting the urge to run back to the car and cry, I grab Hillary's hand like a lost doe.

I avoid a puddle of pee and step tenuously into the lobby.

The elevator is def-jam packed full of people badly in need of a shower who speak like monosyllabic homonculuses with mouths full of cotton.

What seems like hours later, the doors open.

The hallway smells like a Grateful Dead concert sponsored by Budweiser.

The lack of silence is deafening.

I quickly find out, to my agoraphobic horror, that the "Intimate Party" I am about to attend has enough people to make the fire chief bust a blood vessel.

We squeeze our way past plastered bodies shaking their sweaty pilates booties like wildabeasts in heat.

Hillary's Jack Black-esque boyfriend is on the balcony. He is a sweetly sardonic, cerebral, mutton-chopped grizzly bear. He's smoking Marlboro reds and donning his signature outfit of camo shorts, flip-flops and a trucker hat with a picture of the Dalai Lama on it.

He gives me a high five and he introduces me to the swarm. They look me up and down.

A reddredlocked willowy girl skating on the thin ice of anorexia spoke first.

"So, You Go To UCLA?", asks the carb deprived redhead deadhead.

I nod. I like to play.

"You look like a musician or a computer science guy...what're you studying?"

"I'm majoring in Cartography. My dad is Rand McNally"

"Wow"

"Yeah, my minor is in latex body suit making and the impact it's having on post-modern feminist theory as seen through the perspective of the zoobootoo tribe in Africa"

"Zoobootoo?"

"Yeah, that's where all the rubber comes from these days, the cacapoopoo trees in Africa"

"Sweet!", remarks a guy peeing off the balcony, a Spiderman Bong in his free hand.

We stayed just long enough for the fire department to show up (19 minutes), then I grabbed Hillary in a fatherly fashion and we high tailed it out of there.

On my way down the hall, I felt someone grab my butt and tenderly massage my lower back.

I turned to see a young girl in a teddie toga and jeans cut so low they were almost superfluous.

Her bottom lip has a piercing of a micro miniature skull and bones. A combination of sweat and spilled beer has soaked her chest, showing me and the rest of the room that her left nipple is every bit as pierced as the rest of her appendages. Her lower belly sports a walnut sized tattoo (69), just a tongues throw above a strawberry red rash which was revealing the inflamed hot spot of a recent waxing.

Before I could offer to apply ice and herbal first-aid, a boy half my age walked up.

She bites his neck and he greedily gropes himself, self-adjusting his burgeoning tumescence down yonder.

Damn.

Just as I was about to point out to her that I had the perfect cure for her clear cut case of pseudofolliculitis of the symphysis pubis.

You just don't wax your pussy right before a vampire-toga-orgy, sweetie.

You just don't!

Don't these girls mothers teach them anything?

The perils of being a youngster these days.

The perils of being anyone these days.

But I wouldn't want to be anytime else.

2005.

Smack dab between the beginning of the millenium and the end of the Mayan calendar.

What a time to be alive!

What a time to be an anthropologist!

Or a Jesus lover!

Or a Scientologist!

Or a pornographer!

Or a politician!

Or a mortician!

Or an esthetician!

Or a jesus loving sociologist scientologist pornorgrapher politician who works as an esthetician in a morgue!

But I digress.

Back to the party.

Before I could recommend a good post-depilitory ointment for my new fangled girlfriend, my roommate grabbed my hand and we braved our way through the hordes of horny hotties back to the car.

I made it home, drank some holy water, took a cold shower and an aspirin, hung some garlic around my neck and dreamed of being an adult.

I spend my days selling six dollar bottles of water to badly aging hippy women clutching at youth like hungry velociraptors and hawking ginseng that costs more than an iPod to conspiracy theory obsessed raw food deadheads who live out of their vans. Pepper in countless hours spent twiddling my opposable thumbs and day after soul sucking day peddling panacea to the paranormally paranoid and you've got my so called life in an organically grown nutshell.

Wake up.

Coffee.

Clock in.

The endless stream of needy new age vampires suck me dry for 480 minutes.

It's like that scene in Pulp Fiction where Bruce Willis asks Ving Rhames if he's "OK" after being ass raped by the pawn shop owning racist hillbillies.

To quote Marsellus Wallace...

"Nah man, I'm pretty fucking far from OK"

But I am a baby boy step closer to knowing what I'm supposed to be doing, thanks to Wikipedia.

According to Wikipedia, I am an actor, writer, photographer, blogger, advertising creative and voice over guy.

It also says that I "contain adult material".

Damn right I do.

Multitudes.

The above mentioned online encyclopedia does not say a word about me being a babysitter for the sick and needy. Not hair nor hide of herbalist hoo-ha or working wage slave. Not a shred of evidence to support my current bad dream.

I spend my varicose vein inducing days standing on my feet and sitting on my gifts.

I'm tired of usurping my uptime doing that which brings me no pleasure and filling my down time surfing the web and dreaming of the day when Starbucks will supersize and grant me my one wish of a 64 ounce latte.